It is the opinion of many of Balzac’s admirers, and it was the general verdict of his day, that in all this the greatest triumphs are the characters of women. Every French critic tells us that his immense success came to him through women — that they constituted his first, his last, his fondest public. “Who rendered more deliciously than he,” asks Sainte-Beuve, “the duchesses and viscountesses of the end of the Restoration — those women of thirty who, already on the stage, awaited their painter with a vague anxiety, so that when he and they stood face to face there was a sort of electric movement of recognition?” Balzac is supposed to have understood the feminine organism as no one had done before him — to have had the feminine heart, the feminine temperament, feminine nerves, at his fingers’ ends — to have turned the feminine puppet, as it were, completely inside out. He has placed an immense number of women on the stage, and even those critics who are least satisfied with his most elaborate female portraits must at least admit that he has paid the originals the compliment to hold that they play an immense part in the world. It may be said, indeed, that women are the keystone of the “Comédie Humaine.” If the men were taken out, there would be great gaps and fissures; if the women were taken out, the whole fabric would collapse. Balzac’s superior handling of women seems to us to be both a truth and a fallacy; but his strength and weakness so intermingle and overlap that it is hard to keep a separate account with each.
His reader very soon perceives, to begin with, that he does not take that view of the sex that would commend him to the “female sympathizers” of the day. There is not a line in him that would not be received with hisses at any convention for giving women the suffrage, for introducing them into Harvard College, or for trimming the exuberances of their apparel. His restrictive remarks would be considered odious; his flattering remarks would be considered infamous. He takes the old fashioned view — he recognises none but the old-fashioned categories. Woman is the female of man and in all respects his subordinate; she is pretty and ugly, virtuous and vicious, stupid and cunning. There is the great metier de femme — the most difficult perhaps in the world, so that to see it thoroughly mastered is peculiarly exhilarating. The metier de femme includes a great many branches, but they may be all summed up in the art of titillating in one way or another the senses of man. Woman has a “mission” certainly, and this is it. Man’s capacity for entertainment fortunately is large, and he may be gratified along a far-stretching line; so that woman in this way has a very long rope and no reason to complain of want of liberty. Balzac’s conception of what a woman may be and do is very comprehensive; there is no limit to her cleverness, her energy, her courage, her devotion; or, on the other hand, to her vices, her falsity, her meanness, her cruelty, her rapacity. But the great sign of Balzac’s women is that in all these things the sexual quality is inordinately emphasized and the conscience on the whole inordinately sacrificed to it. It is an idea familiar to all novelists — it is indeed half their stock in trade — that women in good and in evil act almost exclusively from personal motives. Men do so often, the romancer says; women do so always. Balzac carries this idea infinitely farther than any other novelist, and imparts to the personal motive a peculiar narrowness and tenacity. It suggests the agility and the undulations, the claws and the vemon, of the cat and the serpent. That perfectly immoral view of what people do, which we spoke of as one of his great characteristics, is supremely conspicuous in Balzac’s dealings with his heroines. “Leur gros libertin de père,” M. Taine calls him in relation to certain of them; and the phrase really applies to him in relation to all, even the purest and most elevated. It is their, personal, physical quality that he relishes — their attitudes, their picturesqueness, the sense that they give him of playing always, sooner or later, into the hands of man — gros libertin thab he naturally and inevitably is. He has drawn a great many women’s figures that are nobly pure in intention; he has even attempted three or four absolute saints. But purity in Balzac’s hands is apt to play us the strangest tricks. Madame Graslin is a saint who has been privy to the murder of her lover and who allows an innocent man to suffer the penalty of the law; Madame Hulot is a saint who at fifty (being very well preserved) offers herself to a man she loathes in order to procure money for her daughter’s marriage portion; Madame de Mortsauf is a saint familiar with the most cynical views of life (vide her letter of advice to Félix de Vandenesse on his entering upon his career, in which the tone is that of a politician and shrewd man of the world) who drives about with her lover late at night, kissing his head and otherwise fondling him. Balzac’s women — and indeed his characters in general — are best divided into the rich and the poor, the Parisians and the rustics. His most ambitious female portraits are in the former class — his most agreeable, and on the whole his most successful, in the latter. Here the women, young and old, are more or less grotesque, but the absence of the desire to assimilate them to the type of the indescribable monster whom Balzac enshrines in the most sacred altitudes of his imagination as the Parisienne, has allowed them to be more human and more consonant to what we, at least, of the Anglo-Saxon race, consider the comfortable social qualities in the gentler sex. Madame Bridau, Madame Grandet, Mademoiselle Cormon, Madame Séchard — these, in Balzac, are the most natural figures of good women. His imagination has easily comprehended them; they are homely and pious and naives, and their horizon is bounded by the walls of their quiet houses. It is when Balzac enters the field of the great ladies and the courtesans that he is supposed to have won his greatest triumphs, the triumphs that placed all the women on his side and made them confess that they had found their prophet and their master. To this view of the matter the writer of these lines is far from assenting. He finds it impossible to understand that the painter of Louise de Chaulieu and Madame d’Espard, of Madame de La Baudraye and Madame de Bargeton, of Lady Dudley and Madame de Maufrigneuse, should not have made all the clever women of his time his enemies.
It is not however, certainly, that here his energy, his force of colour, his unapproached power of what the French call in analytic portrayal “rummaging” — to fouiller — are not at their highest. Never is he more himself than among his coquettes and courtesans, among Madame Schontz and Josépha, Madame Marneffe and Madame de Rochefide. “Balzac loves his Valerie,” says M. Taine, speaking of his attitude toward the horrible Madame Marneffe, the depths of whose depravity he is so actively sounding; and paradoxical as it sounds it is perfectly true. She is, according to Balzac’s theory of the matter, a consummate Parisienne, and the depravity of a Parisienne is to his sense a more remunerative spectacle than the virtue of any provinciale, whether her province be Normandy or Gascony, England or Germany. Never does he so let himself go as in these cases — never does his imagination work so at a heat. Feminine nerves, feminine furbelows, feminine luxury and subtlety, intoxicate and inspire him; he revels among his innumerable heroines like Mahomet in his paradise of houris. In saying just now that women could not complain of Balzac’s restrictions upon their liberty, we had in mind especially the liberty of telling lies. This exquisite and elaborate mendacity he considers the great characteristic of the finished woman of the world, of Mesdames d’Espard, de Sérisy, de Langeais, de Maufrigneuse. The ladies just enumerated have all a great many lovers, a great many intrigues, a great many jealousies, a terrible entanglement of life behind the scenes. They are described as irresistibly charming, as grandes dames in the supreme sense of the word; clever, cold, self-possessed, ineffably elegant, holding salons, influencing politics and letting nothing interfere with their ambition, their coquetry, then- need for money. Above all they are at swords’ points with each other; society for them is a deadly battle for lovers, disguised in a tissue of caresses. To our own sense this whole series of figures is fit only to have a line drawn through it as a laborious and extravagant failure — a failure on which treasures of ingenuity have been expended, but which is perhaps on that account only the more provocative of smiles. These ladies altogether m
iss the mark; they are vitiated by that familiar foible which Thackeray commemorated in so many inimitable pages. Allusion was made in the earlier part of these remarks to Balzac’s strong plebeian strain. It is no reproach to him; if he was of the “people,” he was magnificently so; and if the people never produced anything less solid and sturdy it would need to fear no invidious comparisons. But there is something ineffably snobbish in his tone when he deals with the aristocracy, and in the tone which those members of it who circulate through his pages take from him. They are so conscious, so fatuous, so poseurs, so perpetually alluding to their grandeurs and their quarterings, so determined to be impertinent, so afraid they shall not be impertinent enough, so addicted to reminding you that they are not bourgeois, that they do not pay their debts or practise the vulgar virtues, that they really seem at times to be the creatures of the dreams of an ambitious hairdresser who should have been plying his curling-irons all day and reading fashionable novels all the evening. The refinement of purpose in Balzac, in everything that relates to the emphasis of the aristocratic tone, is often extraordinary; and to see such heroic ingenuity so squandered and dissipated gives us an alarming sense of what a man of genius may sometimes do in the way of not seeing himself as others see him. Madame d’Espard, when she has decided to “take up” her provincial cousine, Madame de Bargeton, conveys her one night to the opera. Lucien de Rubempré comes into the box and, by his provincial dandyism and ingenuous indiscretions, attracts some attention. A rival who is acquainted with the skeleton in his closet goes and tells Madame d’Espard’s friends and enemies that he is not properly a De Rubempré (this being only his mother’s name), and that- his father was M. Chardon, a country apothecaiy. Then the traitor comes and announces this fact to Madame d’Espard and intimates that her neighbours know it. This great lady hereupon finds the situation intolerable, and informs her companion that it will never do to be seen at the opera with the son of an apothecary. The ladies, accordingly, beat a precipitate retreat, leaving Lucien the master of the field. The caste of Vere de Vere in this case certainly quite forgot its repose. But its conduct is quite of a piece with that of the young men of high fashion who, after Madame de Bargeton has been a fortnight in Paris (having come very ill- dressed from Angoulême) are seen to compliment her on the “metamorphosis of her appearance.” What is one to say about Madame de Rochefide, a person of the highest condition, who has by way of decoration of her drawing-room a series of ten water-colour pictures representing the different bedrooms she has successively slept in? What Balzac says is that this performance “gave the measure of a superior impertinence” ; and he evidently thinks that he has bestowed the crowning touch upon a very crushing physiognomy. What is here indicated of Balzac’s great ladies is equally true of his young dandies and lions — his De Marsays and De Trailles. The truly initiated reader of the “Comédie Humaine V will always feel that he can afford to skip the page when he sees the name of De Marsay. Balzac’s dandies are tremendous fellows from a picturesque point of view; the account of De Marsay in” La Fille aux Yeux d’Or” is an example of the “sumptuous” gone mad. Balzac leaves nothing vague in the destinies he shapes for these transcendant fops. Bastignac is prime minister of France, and yet Bastignac in his impecunious youth has been on those terms with Madame de Nucingen which characterized the relations of Tom Jones with Lady Bellaston. Fielding was careful not to make his hero a rival of Sir Robert Walpole. Balzac’s young gentilshommes, as possible historical figures, are completely out of the question. They represent, perhaps, more than anything else, the author’s extraordinary union of vigour and shallowness. In this, however, they have much in common with several other classes of characters that we lack space to consider. There are the young girls (chiefly of the upper class) like Modeste Mignon and Louise de Chaulieu; there are the women of literary talent, like Mademoiselle des Touches and Madame de La Baudraye; there are the journalists, like Lousteau and Emile Blondet. In all these cases Balzac “rummages” with extraordinary ardour; but his faults of taste reach their maximum and offer us an incredible imbroglio of the superb and the ignoble. Mademoiselle de Chaulieu talks about her arms, her bosom, her hips, in a way to make a trooper blush. Lousteau, when a lady says a clever thing, tells her he will steal it from her for his newspaper and get two dollars. As regards Rubempré and Canalis, we have specimens of their poetry, but we have on the whole more information about their coats and trousers, their gloves and shirts and cosmetics.
In all this it may seem that there has been more talk about faults than about merits, and that if it is claimed that Balzac did a great work we should have plucked more flowers and fewer thistles. But the greatest thing in Balzac cannot be exhibited by specimens. It is Balzac himself — it is the whole attempt — it is the method. This last is his unsurpassed, his incomparable merit. That huge, all-compassing, all- desiring, all-devouring love of reality which was the source of so many of his fallacies and stains, of so much dead-weight in his work, was also the foundation of his extraordinary power. The real, for his imagination, had an authority that it has never had for any other. When he looks for it in the things in which we all feel it, he finds it with a marvellous certainty of eye, and proves himself the great novelist that he pretends to be. When he tries to make it prevail everywhere, explain everything and serve as a full measure of our imagination — then he becomes simply the greatest of dupes. He is an extraordinary tissue of contradictions. He is at once one of the most corrupt of writers and one of the most naïf, the most mechanical and pedantic, and the fullest of bonhomie and natural impulse. He is one of the finest of artists and one of the coarsest. Viewed in one way, his. novels are ponderous, shapeless, overloaded; his touch is graceless, violent, barbarous. Viewed in another, his tales have more colour, more composition, more grasp of the reader’s attention than any others. Balzac’s style would demand a chapter apart. It is the least simple style, probably, that ever was written; it bristles, it cracks, it swells and swaggers; but it is a perfect expression of the man’s genius. Like his genius, it contains a certain quantity of everything, from immaculate gold to flagrant dross. He was a very bad writer, and yet unquestionably he was a very great writer. “We may say briefly, that in so far as his method was an instinct it was successful, and that in so far as it was a theory it was a failure. But both in instinct and in theory he had the aid of an immense force of conviction. His imagination warmed to its work so intensely that there was nothing his volition could not impose upon it. Hallucination settled upon him, and he believed anything that was necessary in the circumstances. This accounts for all his grotesque philosophies, his heroic attempts to furnish specimens of things of which he was profoundly ignorant. He believed that he was about as creative as the Deity, and that if mankind and human history were swept away the” Comédie Humaine “would be a perfectly adequate substitute for them. M. Taine says of him very happily that, after Shakespeare, he is our great magazine of documents on human nature. When Shakespeare is suggested we feel rather his differences from Shakespeare — feel how Shakespeare’s characters stand out in the open air of the universe, while Balzac’s are enclosed in a peculiar artificial atmosphere, musty in quality and limited in amount, which persuades itself with a sublime sincerity that it is a very sufficient infinite. But it is very true that Balzac may, like Shakespeare, be treated as a final authority upon human nature; and it is very probable that as time goes on he will be resorted to much less for entertainment, and more for instruction. He has against him that he lacks that slight bu needful thing — charm. To feel how much he lacked it, you must read his prefaces, with their vanity, avidity, and garrulity, their gross revelation of his processes, of his squabbles with his publishers, their culinary atmosphere. But our last word about him is that he had incomparable power.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1441